Question

Basically, I want to have an interface for converting Objects to/from their XML or JSON String representation, something like

public interface IStringifier{

/**
   Converts the Object to it's String representation, e.g. XML or JSON
*/
   public String toString(Object o);

/**
   Converts from the String representation (e.g. XML or JSON) to an Object
*/
   public Object fromString(String s, Class<?> clazz);
}

Such an interface would be fairly simple to implement in GSON, XStream etc. but by abstracting it you are abstracted from knowing just what is going on underneath. And you are decoupled from one of the many many XML or JSON libraries, so clients are freer to pick their favorite.

Is there any “standard” Java interface for this? Something in Guava, Apache, etc?

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(added) None of the answers were what I really wanted (“yes, in javax.obscure.interfaces there’s what you want”) but thanks for the replies. I’ll accept Tom’s answer as the most informative/provocative. And maybe I’ll clean up the code I have and try to create a standard. 🙂

Answer 1

I think you’re overthinking this. You don’t actually care about turning objects into Strings, you want to be able to serialize objects to different formats without knowing what that format is. But who says that different format is a String? What happens when you want your object to be available as a protocol buffer? That’s a binary format, not a character format — so stringify() won’t help there. Ultimately, it’s up to you to architect your application to be as independent as possible of those details.